Elcano and the First Circumnavigation of the World Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by Mark West
Prologue
As I have described in my previous account of the life of Juan Sebastian Elcano before he joined the fleet under the command of Ferdinand Magellan, I am an English historian who had the incredibly good fortune to find undiscovered documents about the life of Elcano. I translated these documents from medieval Spanish to English and have published the account of Elcano’s life before 1519 when he set sail on the fleet to discover a passage to the Spice Islands that would attempt to place Spain at the heart of the lucrative spice trade, and break the monopoly held by Portugal.
That first account had been dictated to a young boy sailor in 1526 by Elcano when he was second in command on the Loaiza fleet which left Spain in 1525 to retrace the steps of the Magellan voyage.
This current volume was mistakenly archived along with that account of the life of Elcano, dictated by Elcano to the scribe Andrés de Urdaneta. However, unlike that account written by Urdaneta, this document was an original account of the voyage of circumnavigation written by Elcano himself after he had completed the first circumnavigation of the world in 1522. Previously, it had been assumed that there were only partial records of the voyage, especially the logs of kilometres sailed and of latitude and longitude noted daily by the pilots of the fleet, and that the only full account of the voyage had been written by the Italian, Antonio Pigafetta, who had joined the voyage with Magellan as a supernumerary, meaning that he held no official position in the fleet. However, he soon became close to Magellan, so he was biased against Elcano on account of Elcano taking part in a mutiny against Magellan while the fleet overwintered in the port of San Julián in South America. As a result, Pigafetta’s account of the voyage failed to mention the part played by Elcano in completing the voyage that had begun as Magellan’s vision of finding a new route to the Spice Islands.
This account by Elcano sheds new light on the voyage, on the tensions that existed among the participants, on the sights they saw, on the hardships and disasters they endured, and on the return to Spain after making the first circumnavigation of the world. It is a unique account written by the man who succeeded in circumnavigating the globe in a small wooden ship at a time when half the world had not been explored by Europeans, and when it was not even sure that it might be possible to sail around the globe. However, as the account covers a period of more than three years, I have taken the liberty of dividing it into two parts for publication. This present part describes the voyage to the Philippines, the death of Magellan, and the aftermath of that death. A future book will describe how the one remaining ship of the five that had so hopefully set sail from Sevilla in 1519 returned to Sevilla three years later, and what happened in Elcano’s life until he once more set sail in 1525 to revisit the route to the Spice Islands discovered by Magellan.
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